Why Business Conferences are a Waste of Time (and how to get your money's worth!)

Conference season's upon us and it's gonna be a blast. Go to every show, or is it just a big waste of time? Stick around, we're gonna talk about this today, guys. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Dan from millennialmotivator.ca, helping you learn how to create, engage, and inspire. If you're new to the channel, click that subscribe button. Little like. I put out videos here Monday through Saturday helping you learn how to engage your customers more effectively online, build your sales, and be a better entrepreneur. Today though, what we're looking at is conferences. We're in the middle of conference and event season. Spring is here, summer's picking up, all these conferences pop up left, right, and center, and people get into the serious vibe of it. Oh, I got to go to this conference. Are you gonna meet me over here at this conference? This thing over here is happening. Are you gonna be there? And the reality is, it's all kind of empty and shallow unless you understand the purpose of attending these events and conferences. So what we're gonna look at today are some positives and a big negative to these conferences. All right, so without further ado, let's go. All right, guys, let's talk about the elephant in the room. Let's get the negative out of the way, and then we can build from there about what makes the conference season event season so exciting and how you can actually pull some value from it. Now, the honest truth that I've gotta give you guys about the conferences and the events is generally they are a monumental waste of time. And I know that there's a lot of people out there that are gonna get up in arms, they're gonna feel their bristles go up on this, but the reality is it's true. People show up and whether it's 1 day, 3 days, 4 days, a week, I don't care how long the conference is, could be an hour. If you are not attending the conference for the right purposes, with the right goals in mind, with the right stories in mind, what's gonna happen is You're gonna show up, you're gonna dish out cash, I don't care how much it is, from $100 to $300 to $8,000. I don't care how much the conference is costing you. What it is costing you is time, focus, and energy, and that's what I'm most concerned with, okay? So, why am I saying this? Well, more and more these conferences are turning into Comic-Cons essentially for the business world. Look at all these big faces that are here, come see these big faces, it's gonna be great. You'll hear them talk, it'll be awesome. And people go and they watch Grant Cardone and they watch— and I love these guys, I'm not speaking down to Gary Vee and Grant Cardone and all these great guys that go to these conferences and keynotes. I speak at conferences. But I'm gonna offer you this: when you go for the show, it's overpriced. There's nothing that you couldn't get off of a Grant Cardone or a Gary Vee YouTube video from these conferences. The keynotes are all very similar. They give a similar message. They provide a similar tone. If you are going to a conference for the limelight, for the show, for the razzle-dazzle of it all, you are going for the wrong reason. It will not help you grow as an entrepreneur. It will not help you grow your business. If you are going for a 3-day movie ticket, skip the ticket. Save the cash. Put it back into your business. That's the rough side of this, guys. The elephant in the room, it's out there. Everybody has seen it. It's a waste of time if you're going for the show. But how can you make a conference worthwhile to your business? How can you help it to grow? That's what we're talking about. That's what we want to see. So let's figure that out. If you are not going for the show, what are you going for? Good question, right? I'm not gonna give you the answer flat out. The reality is this, guys, you need to decide ahead of time what the value proposition is for you attending a conference or event. Now, I see a lot of people out there that are going, well, I'm I go to this conference for this reason, that reason, that reason, but in reality they come home and what they show me is, and I don't have a stack of business cards, but pretend stack of business cards like this, right? Bam. Okay, I've got a stack of business cards. Great. I come home with them and they go on my desk or they go in the garbage or they never get used. And even if you go through them, they're not going to help you grow your business because they're not leads, they're acquaintances. This blows my mind that before you attend a conference or event, you don't have a clear value proposition in mind. Why are you going? What is the value you hope to attain from it? Is there a piece of knowledge that you're hoping to acquire from this conference that you can't get anywhere else? The reality is, don't go to the conference. That knowledge is readily available online somewhere else or in a book. This book is gonna cost you a lot less than, well, let's use somebody that actually will be at a conference. Gary Vee's crushing it, right? Everything that Gary Vee's gonna say in a keynote is in this book, guaranteed. This book costs, well, I mean, this one costs $25. You can probably get it cheaper now on Amazon, right? But the reality is this, if you're looking for knowledge, a conference or an event is not the best place to go and get it. Now, if you're looking for experience, if you're looking to have a one-on-one and speak to Gary Vee, or you're looking to have a one-on-one and speak to Grant Cardone, the reality is this, guys, then there is value. If you can, if you think you can get in front of those people, have a conversation, have a dialogue, Troubleshoot, get a— get in on the Q&A, you're willing to take the time and effort to make that happen, great. That's a reason to go to the conference. There's value there. If you are looking to attend a conference and create new acquaintances, build into a new network, let's say you just arrived in a new area or you're new to an industry and you're trying to see how other people go about doing it, great. There's experience there, actually meeting people and hearing their stories and talking with them. There's value there, okay? But if If you are going to get just knowledge from the keynotes, from the speeches, skip it. Save it, save the money, put it back into the business, buy some great books and read them. That's my recommendation. That's what I'm gonna give you. If the one-on-one experience of you speaking to a keynote, you getting in on a Q&A session, you having a one-on-one, that's worth the money. Always, always, always, always to have that one-on-one. But if you're going just to sit in the crowd, skip it, pass it, move on. Now what else can be of value in the conference season outside of you attending a business conference or entrepreneur conference? And this is one of the biggest ones out there that we miss. It's this, it's this, guys. You are going to the wrong conferences. How is that the biggest thing? The reality is this: you're in business, you're an entrepreneur, right? Which kind of conferences do you attend? Well, typically in the past you've attended business, entrepreneurship, build your own Brand, self-branding, social media, digital marketing. How do I grow it? How do I build it? And what I'm telling you is this: it is the wrong conference that you are attending. It's the wrong event you're attending. What event should you be attending? Well, stop for a moment and take a look at your product. What is your product? What is your service? Who are your clientele? Find a conference that they are going to attend. Bam! That's where you want to be. That's where you want to network. When I go to a conference or event, I I don't spend a lot of time in keynotes and sessions. You know where I spend my time? I spend my time at the people who have a business at the conferences. 9 times out of 10, guys, you go to a conference and they have a row, a room, several rooms, an entire floor of booths of people touting their business saying, this is who I am, this is what I'm about, look at what I've got, you want to buy what I've got. And the reality is, as a digital marketing consultant, this is priceless. Prime territory for me to pick up clients. I attend conferences and events because it is a literal buffet of potential clients. Now, let's say you are somebody who is in a— I need to spitball something here. Let's say beauty or health, right? Fitness. Fitness is big. Diet and fitness. So what you do is you do not go and attend a business seminar. You don't go attend a personal fitness instructor. You don't go to that. That's not the place. Place for you. What you want to attend is a food conference, a food event, places where you know there are going to be people that need your services. That's where you go. You reach out to people there. You help people there. You engage in dialogues. You network there. You go to a fitness event, all you're going to find are other fitness instructors, dietitians, nutritionists. It's going to suck. You'll get to meet some nice people and that'll be cool and it'll be fun. You'll make some new friends. That'll be great, but the reality is this. Not one new client will you make as a result of attending that conference. But you attend a food conference, you attend a food event, and what are you going to have? You're going to have people left, right, and center that you see that love food but overindulge and need your services to understand how to diet, have nutrition, have better fitness in order to be able to enjoy the things that they love, the food that they love, and lose weight. This is a simple process that you can easily implement with almost any business out there, guys. Almost any business. I don't attend a business conference for myself. The knowledge I can get at home. I'm happy to read a book. But the people that have booths set up at a conference or event and are struggling to find conversions, when in reality they could have taken all that money that they put into their booth and put it online and had actual conversions come from it, those are the people I need to speak to and create strategies with and build relationships with, because therein lies the That's right, the potential for sale. Now, all these different possibilities come to mind. I want to give you one more. I know a guy that's into publishing books. He publishes books for entrepreneurs. He sits down with them, he interviews them, he— his sole purpose is to interview these people, get their stories out there, find some ghostwriters that can effectively write novels for them, bam, get those novels to market, help them use it as a marketing and branding tool. Which type of event does he attend? You're darn right he attends those entrepreneurship and business conferences. He just got back from the Grant Cardone 10X con. Why? Because from that con he picked up multiple contracts. It was his audience. He went to see his consumers. Somebody did him the favor of grouping thousands of potential customers, not thousands of potential associates or acquaintances or fellow competition, he went to where the customers were. So let's break this down. Let's finish this up, guys. Conference season is upon us. You don't go for the show. Number 1, write it down. Hopefully you've got your Post-its or you've got your journal kicking around, right? Grab the journal, write it down, grab the pen. Let's go. Don't go for the show. We're clear on that, right? Next up. What do you want to make sure? You want to make sure you're not going home with a stack of business cards. You want to make sure that you are actually reaching out to the people of influence, having the one-on-ones, and learning specifically what you came to learn from their mouth directly. You're not sitting with 10,000 other people inside a Grant Cardone keynote. What you're looking to do is get Grant Cardone alone in the lunch line, ask if you can sit down at lunch with him and have a conversation. That's what you're looking for. Last but not least, guys, make sure you're going to the right events. Make sure you're going to the right events. If you are looking to grow your business, do not go to a place where other business people that are like-minded with you and are your competition are plentiful by the 10,000. Go to the place where there's nobody doing what you're doing and everybody needs you to do it. That's where you'll find the benefit. Those are my tips for conference and event season, guys. I'd love to hear your thoughts down in the comments below. Let me know what you think. If you liked the video, give it a like, share it out to those people that you know that attend every conference out there, and and see what their thoughts are. Thank you so much for watching, guys. We will be back tomorrow with another great video. And don't forget, Saturdays, guys, we are doing live channel reviews for YouTube, social media, and websites. So if you have a website, a YouTube channel, or a social network that you would like reviewed, I'm happy to do that noon Eastern Standard Time here on this channel. Make sure you've got the bell clicked, that way you know when I go live. I'll catch you tomorrow, guys. Take it easy. Bye.